In this paper we study a model of rational consumption and quitting in the context of harmful addictive goods. We assume that a person has imperfect information about his ability to resist and terminate the addiction. We first characterize the optimal consumption path of a non-addicted person,...

We show that small switching costs can have surprisingly dramatic effects in infinitely repeated games if these costs are large relative to payoffs in a single period. This shows that the results in Lipman and Wang do have analogs in the case of infinitely repeated games [Lipman, B., Wang, R.,...

The effects of information on market design are explored in a simple setting where firms have private information about their correlated fixed costs and the government aims to maximize its expected revenue conditional on achieving efficient allocations. Government revenues are higher when the...

This paper examines how a bidder can benefit from jump bidding by using the jump bid as a signal of a high valuation which causes other bidders to drop out of the auction earlier than they would otherwise. The information contained in a jump bid must be sufficient to induce a discrete change in...

Two popular selling methods--posted-price selling and auctions--are compared here in an independent private-values model. Without auctioning costs, auctioning is always optimal. When auctioning is costly, auctions are still preferable if the marginal-revenue curve is sufficiently steep. The...

wo most popular selling methods -- posted-price selling and auctions -- are compared in this paper. We confirm the common belief that auctions are most often used when the distribution of the object's value is widely dispersed. The choice of selling methods usually depends on the costs of...

We show that small switching costs can have surprisingly dramatic effects in infinitely repeated games if these costs are large relative to payoffs in a single period. This shows that the results in Lipman and Wang [2000] do have analogs in the case of infinitely repeated games. We also discuss...

In this paper, we re-examine various previous experimental studies of the Centipede Game in the literature. These experiments found that players rarely follow the subgame-perfect equilibrium strategies of the game, and various modifications to the game were proposed to explain the outcomes of...

We show that the standard results for finitely repeated games do not survive the combination of two simple variations on the usual model. In particular, we add a small cost of changing actions and consider the effect of increasing the frequency of repetitions within a fixed period of time. We...